I wonder if it has anything to do with the hurricane.
This is what a lack of competition looks like.
However… Twice the price of 4nm? The gains are fairly marginal from what I gather. I don’t think many will bother.
It’s both lack of competition and the end of Moores law. We’ve effectively reached the end of silicon gate sizes and the tooling complexity required to keep shrinking process nodes and increase transistor density is increasing exponentially, so semiconducters no longer get cheaper… and it’s starting to push these cutting edge nodes outside of economic viability for consumer products. I’m sure TSMC is taking a very healthy profit cut for sure but the absolute magic they have to work to have 2nm work at all is beginning to be too much.
the end of Moores law
It’s been talked about a lot. Lots of people have predicted it.
It does eventually have to end though. And I think even if this isn’t the end, we’re close to the end. At the very least, we’re close to the point of diminishing returns.Look at the road to here-- We got to the smallest features the wavelength of light could produce (and people said Moore’s Law was dead), so we used funky multilayer masks to make things smaller and Moore lived on. Then we hit the limits of masking and again people said Moore’s Law was dead, so ASML created a whole new kind of light with a narrower wavelength (EUV) and Moore lived on.
But there is a very hard limit that we won’t work around without a serious rethink of how we build chips- the width of the silicon atom. Today’s chips have pathways that are in many cases well under 100 atoms wide. Companies like ASML and TSMC are pulling out all the stops to make things smaller, but we’re getting close to the limit of what’s possible with the current concepts of chip production (using photolithography to etch transistors onto silicon wafers). Not possible like can we do it, but possible like what the laws of physics will let us do.
That’s going to be an interesting change for the industry, it will mean slower growth in processing power. That won’t be a problem for the desktop market as most people only use a fraction of their CPU’s power. It will mean the end of the ‘more efficient chip every year’ improvement for cell phones and mobile devices though.
There will be of course customers calling for more bigger better, and I think that will be served by more and bigger. Chiplets will become more common, complete with higher TDP. That’ll help squeeze more yield out of an expensive wafer as the discarded parts will contain fewer mm^2. Wouldn’t be surprised to see watercooling become more common in high performance workstations, and I expect we’ll start to see more interest in centralized watercooling in the server markets. The most efficient setup I’ve seen so far basically hangs server mainboards on hooks and dunks them in a pool of non-conductive liquid. That might even lead to a rethink of the typical vertical rack setup to something horizontal.
It’s gonna be an interesting next few years…
I mean technically moores law has been dead for 15 years. The main reason we went to multi-core was we couldn’t keep up otherwise.
I was under the impression that anything under like 10nm was just marketing and doesn’t actually refer to transistor density in any meaningful way?
The number has some connection to transistor density, in the sense that a lower number means generally higher density. However there is not any physical feature on the chip that is actually 3nm in length.
This has been true since the late 90s probably.
It is marketing and it does have meaningful connection to the litho features, but the connection is not absolute. For example Samsung’s 5nm is noticeably more power hungry than TSMC’s 5nm.
I’m of the opinion that this is why liquid cooling is so important to next gen hw. I think they’re going to start spreading out the chips more and sandwiching them like with the dh200s Nvidia is working on
Liquid cooling has become more needed because processors and gpu’s have become outrageous power hogs. Desktops needing 1,000 watt psu’s is just outrageous.
That’s not really true, except at the ultra high end. My 4070 barely draws more than my old 1070. The 4080 draws the same as a 3080 with double the performance.
I would argue water cooling is far less needed today. What has changed is Nvidia selling chips that would have been considered extreme aftermarket overclocking 10 years ago.
Dangerous game considering Intel should be coming up with their 18A node pretty soon now, and it will supposedly be competitive with TSMC’s 3nm or 2nm according to rumors. They will only need to compete in price, and if they are competitive in performance, and TSCM is increasing their prices so much, it would be a good way for Intel to take some of that market share.
They aren’t going to be competitive in their foundry with them laying off so many experienced operators. I work at a fab down the street from intel and our hiring classes went from 10 every other week to 20-30 now.
you have practical, working tsmc chips plus next-gen r&d versus theoretical chips from Intel, a company that has not fared well over 30 years of trying to catch up with TSMC.
they’re not worried yet.
And with the issues intel had with their processors…
It does sound like most of that was not actually manufacturing, but design.
If you’re referring to the 13&14th Gen chips then yes, Intel is saying it’s on the software side.
But if you’re talking about 10th Gen chips that took forever to get out of the gate due to issues with sub 14nm lithography, then no it’s a hardware issue. Intel has had issues over recent years with actual die shrinks.
Regardless, it feels like what we see with Boeing. A company culture that prioritized marketing and time to market over everything else consequences be damned.
Move fast and break stuff is probably not the best strategy if you are building airplanes or processors or other PhD level stuff… Or maybe it’s just never a good strategy.
Yeah nice fast and break things is a great way to maximize short term profits at the expense of the long term. But fuck it, I got mine in the short term, so it works.
If you’re referring to the 13&14th Gen chips then yes, Intel is saying it’s on the software side.
Yes, I was, but there was also some initial manufacturing issue with oxidation. That wasn’t the bulk of the issues that they were running into, though.
